Charlaine Harris

Jean Charlaine Harris Schulz, born November 25, 1951, is an American author whose work centers on mysteries, often with recurring characters and, in her later books, urban fantasy. She was born and raised in Tunica, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta. Harris began writing early, first with poems about ghosts and teenage angst. While attending Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, she wrote plays, then moved toward writing and publishing mysteries.

Harris first built her career through series fiction. After publishing two stand-alone mysteries, she began the Aurora Teagarden books with Real Murders in 1990, a novel nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Novel. She wrote several Aurora books before branching into other projects, later returning to the series in 1999 and continuing it in later years. In 1996 she launched the Shakespeare series, featuring cleaning lady detective Lily Bard in rural Arkansas. The fifth book, Shakespeare’s Counselor, appeared in 2001, followed by the short story “Dead Giveaway” in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Harris has said she is finished with that series.

She is best known for The Southern Vampire Mysteries, the series about Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress working in a Northern Louisiana bar. The first book, Dead Until Dark, won the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Mystery in 2001. The books follow Sookie as she tries to solve mysteries involving vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures. Harris wrote thirteen novels in the series, ending with Dead Ever After in May 2013, followed by the supplemental book After Dead in October 2013. The second novel, Living Dead in Dallas, won the 2003 Lord Ruthven Award for Fiction, and The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories won the 2018 Ruthven Award for Fiction.

The Sookie Stackhouse novels reached an even wider audience when they were adapted by HBO as True Blood. The television series ran for seven seasons, from 2008 through 2014, totaled 80 episodes, and was both a critical and financial success. It was nominated for dozens of awards and became HBO’s most viewed show since The Sopranos. Other Harris works also moved into new formats: Hallmark Movies & Mysteries began adapting the Aurora Teagarden novels into television films in 2014, starring Candace Cameron Bure, and NBC developed Midnight, Texas as a television series that began airing in 2017. Her books have also been adapted by GraphicAudio, and video games have been based on Dead in the Family and Shakespeare’s Landlord.

Harris’s fiction was shaped by both place and experience. She has lived in small towns, including Magnolia, Arkansas, where she was senior warden of St. James Episcopal Church, and as of 2017 she lives in Texas with her husband. They have three grown children and two grandchildren. She is a former weightlifter and karate student, as well as an avid reader and cinemaphile. Harris has recounted being sexually assaulted at knifepoint by an intruder in her home when she was 25, an event that led her to pursue karate and weightlifting. She has said it is also why the protagonists of her novels are “women who strike back.” That direct thread between danger, survival, and character helps explain why her stories still speak clearly to readers who value wit, nerve, and a mystery with teeth.